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Jeremy Hunt said the government would cut National Insurance by 2 per cent, would abolish the non-dom tax status and would raise the threshold for child benefits in his Budget today. To discuss the new measures, Katy Balls speaks to Kate Andrews and David Miles, from the Office for Budget Responsibility.
The Chancellor will be anxiously preparing himself this evening for tomorrow’s papers, waiting to see how his Budget lands. He won’t need to wait quite as long to hear how his own party members have received it, however. And the verdict is already in from the Scottish Tories. It isn’t good. Jeremy Hunt’s decision to extend the energy profits levy, which taxes the profits of oil and gas companies, to 2029 has left Scotland’s Tory MPs furious. Never mind bad press, might the Chancellor have inadvertently landed a Tory rebellion in Sunak’s in-tray? Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross was the first to hit out by announcing that he will not
Jeremy Hunt is the spotty, speccy geek who doesn’t wear specs and doesn’t have spots. But ‘geek’ is very much Hunt’s brand. He’s a gangly, uncool type who, for no reason whatever, is as tall as a basketball player. In his Budget he set out to promote Continuity Conservatism, and spoke as if this were a mid-term financial plan from a steady-eddie Tory administration. He kept saying ‘since 2010’ as he boasted of Tory achievements that go back 14 years. He claimed that ‘800 jobs’ had been added ‘every day’ since the Conservatives took power and he said that they’d hired ‘250 more doctors and 400 more nurses for every
Whilst Jeremy Hunt’s cut to National Insurance may grab the headlines, the real story of today’s Budget was hidden in the official forecasts accompanying it. These forecasts point to a disaster for Britain’s labour force. The UK already had one of the worst post-lockdown workforce recoveries in the world, with a record 2.8 million people off work due to long-term sickness. But today the OBR said things are only going to get worse. Spending on welfare now makes up the second biggest portion of your tax bill – narrowly pipped to the post by our NHS The OBR gave the Chancellor credit for expanding childcare provision, attempting to reform welfare
Can the Tory party now credibly claim it is cutting taxes? That was the big mystery going into Jeremy Hunt’s pre-election Budget this afternoon, as so many of the policy measures had already been trailed. As expected, the Chancellor announced another 2p off employee National Insurance, following on from the 2p cut he announced in the Autumn Statement. Between both fiscal events, NI falls from 12 per cent to 8 per cent (and from 10 per cent to 6 per cent for the self-employed) – a saving of £900 a year for the average worker. Hunt also announced changes to child benefit rules, which will shift the calculations from individual to
Keir Starmer’s response to the Budget was delayed a little because the SNP forced a division on the immediate measures announced by the Chancellor. This was unusual, but if it gave the Labour leader a little more time to work out what he was going to say, it wasn’t clear he’d used it. He offered a stump speech that we’ve heard before: this was the ‘last, desperate act of a party that has failed’ and that there should be an election on 2 May. As I said earlier, if that was the last big event before Rishi Sunak calls a May election, he’s clearly aiming for a very low-key campaign
This afternoon Jeremy Hunt delivered his second Budget as Chancellor. Much of his speech had been trailed over the previous days. The headline measure is a 2p cut in National Insurance, rather than the more expensive mooted cut to income tax. This will benefit 27 million workers from April: when combined with the previous cut to national insurance in the autumn statement, it is a cut worth £900 to the average earner. Labour will counter that it is just another example of the Tories giving with one hand but taking ‘even more with the other.’ Hunt’s other major tax change was the abolition of the non-doms scheme which could force
If Jeremy Hunt’s Budget was the final flourish before a May election, it’s going to be a very low-key campaign indeed. The Chancellor did announce his National Insurance cut as trailed overnight, and abolished the non-dom status – also trailed – which will raise £2.7 billion for tax cuts for working people. He increased the child benefit threashold to £60,000, and prolonged the cut in fuel duty. But he had no big surprise, and no aggressive political attack. I suspect that the excited chatter around Westminster about Rishi Sunak calling a spring poll may die down a little now. Hunt’s own attacks on Labour were hardly aggressive There was still
Jeremy Hunt failed to raise many laughs with his Budget gags – but his quips went down particularly badly with Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner. After picking on Keir Starmer with a rather crude jibe at his weight, Hunt then turned the guns on Rayner, who has recently been reported to the taxman over allegations she may have failed to pay thousands when selling her old home, a former council house. ‘I have also been looking at the stamp duty relief for people who purchase more than one dwelling in a single transaction, known as Multiple Dwellings Relief,’ adding: ‘I see the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party paying close
Prime Minister’s Questions today was a weighty affair, with Keir Starmer focusing on the murder of Sarah Everard following the Angiolini Report into the failings of the police that allowed Wayne Couzens to continue in his role and to abduct his victim. The Labour leader asked how it could be the case that there was ‘nothing to stop another Couzens operating in plain sight’ three years on from Everard’s death. Sunak replied that the government had taken action ‘quickly’ to ‘strengthen police vetting, strengthen the rules for rooting out officers who are not there to serve and conducted the largest-ever screening of all serving officers and staff’. He added that
Jeremy Hunt’s Budget was short on surprises. The Chancellor cut National Insurance for workers by another 2p in a bid to address the Tories’ poll slide ahead of the upcoming general election. Hunt also announced a shake-up to child benefit charges, said that ‘non-dom’ tax status would be scrapped and said that alcohol and fuel duty would be frozen. Here are the Budget announcements in full: Follow all the analysis as it unfolded on our live blog:
The News Agents podcast has had a mixed reception in the UK but its presenters are having an even rougher ride in the US. Host Emily Maitlis ambushed Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on ‘Super Tuesday’ to get her reaction to Trump’s victory. Asking first about the Republican party’s message for Trump’s competitor Nikki Haley, Maitlis swiftly moved on to a fiery line of questioning. She asked why ‘so many people who support Trump love conspiracy theories’, using as an example Greene’s own comments that the 2018 Camp Fire was started by ‘Jewish space lasers’. Suffice to say this didn’t exactly go down well. A
The Princess of Wales has been photographed for the first time since she was hospitalised earlier this year. But while the picture, which shows Catherine in a car driven by her mother Carole Middleton, is splashed across the American celebrity website TMZ, it won’t be appearing in British newspapers. So why is the British press so scrupulous, so abstemious and so responsible – things they could never have been accused of in the Wild West days of the old Fleet Street – when their American cousins still shoot from the hip when it comes to publishing paparazzi pictures of the Royals? The Earl’s words hit home It all goes back to
Will a UAE-backed entity buy the Telegraph and The Spectator? Not if parliament gets its way. More than 100 MPs have signed a letter saying that this should not happen, demanding a veto on foreign states taking over British titles. Former Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick, who organised the letter, told this morning’s Today programme: We believe that freedom of the press is a fundamental bulwark of democracy, and it is therefore very important that we protect our major national newspapers and media outlets from inappropriate control by foreign powers. Jenrick says that he and his colleagues are proposing that, alongside the existing powers that the government has, there should be a vote in parliament on whether these
It will put more money in people’s pockets. It will improve the incentives to work. And it will put down a marker that the party does still believe taxes can occasionally be cut. The Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is not the world’s finest speech-maker, but he will probably attempt a few rhetorical flourishes when he cuts 2 per cent off the rate of National Insurance in his Budget later today. The trouble is, it is going to prove a damp squib, and not least because it has been widely trailed in advance. In reality, a modest reduction in National Insurance is not going to save the Conservative party from defeat at
Long gone are the days when you had a job for life. But, for young folks especially, it seems we don’t just do one job in a week. The strivers are scrambling for second jobs. Though it is hard to ascertain exact numbers through official statistics, some surveys suggest more than two-thirds of British Gen Zs are now supplementing their income with side hustles. A side gig could well be the most sensible way to improve your prospects Some of this is out of necessity, thanks to stagnant wages and rising living costs. But it is also being driven by attitude changes, and a desire to choose more purpose and freedom in
Anyone expecting Jeremy Hunt to unleash the animal spirits of wealth creators in his Budget today cannot have been paying much attention to the Treasury’s pre-briefing. Two per cent off National Insurance is likely to be as good as it gets, we are told. Perhaps a white rabbit will be pulled from a hat during the speech itself but more likely the animal in question will be a sloth. Such a creature – steady and dependable but resolutely undynamic – would be emblematic of the condition of what pundits used to term ‘UK plc’. For Britain under Hunt does not have an economy so much as a ‘meh-conomy’. While talk
It’s Budget day today. With the tax burden predicted to amount to 37 per cent of national income by the next election, the 2019 to 2024 parliament is set to go down as the biggest tax-raising parliament in modern times. A rather impressive feat for a Tory party that likes to paint itself as one of low taxes and financial stability. In fact, under the last 14 years of Conservative government, Mr S has discovered there have been over 1,000 tax rises. While we eagerly await today’s Budget announcements, here is a list of some of the most significant tax hikes introduced under various Tory Chancellors since 2010… Income tax
This Budget is probably Jeremy Hunt’s last fiscal event before the election, and the Chancellor will want to at least set a fair wind for the Conservatives to head into polling day. That means giving voters a sense that sticking with the Tories is the safer option, offering them giveaways on tax and the sense that more tax cuts might be to come – as well as avoiding the sort of post-Budget rows that can define a government in all the wrong ways. Hunt is expected to cut National Insurance by a further two percentage points, on top of the 2 point cut he made in the autumn. This is
Super Tuesday is over and so is the primary season. Although some states have not voted yet and a few others have not finished counting, the parties’ nominees are now locked in. They were really locked in several weeks ago. Biden had no serious competition and Trump vanquished his two main rivals in the early voting. Trump’s chief competitors were Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s UN ambassador. The former president effectively clinched the nomination when he beat both decisively on their most favourable terrain: DeSantis in Iowa and Haley in New Hampshire and her home state. Haley stayed in the race
